Why Restaurant Row's Oldest Tables Never Left Northwood's Doorstep

"It's considered like a little secret still to this day, which is fantastic," said Chase Clardy, general manager of Thoroughbreds Chophouse, describing a restaurant that has been serving steaks off North Kings Highway since 1988. That is a strange thing to say about a restaurant sitting on a strip everyone calls Restaurant Row, a name built for visibility, not secrecy. But Clardy is onto something Northwood residents already know and outsiders keep missing: the restaurants that have survived longest on this stretch of Kings Highway were never really built for the tourist traffic passing by. They were built for the people who live close enough to keep coming back.

Northwood sits at the quiet end of that equation. The neighborhood runs from 76th Avenue North to 79th Avenue North, boxed in by the 17 Bypass on one side and Kings Highway on the other, a pocket of brick ranches with no HOA and mature lots that has stayed put while the Grand Strand around it turned over condo towers and chain restaurants every decade. What that boundary line does not show on a map is how directly it borders one of the oldest surviving restaurant clusters on the entire coast, and how much that cluster owes its longevity to neighborhoods exactly like this one.

A Strip Built On Repeat Business, Not Passing Cars

Restaurant Row runs along Kings Highway from where the 17 Bypass and 17 Business merge on the south end up to the Kings Road interchange near the North Myrtle Beach line, a corridor that has absorbed decades of Grand Strand dining trends. Most of what opened along it in any given decade eventually closed, rebranded, or got demolished for something newer. What is notable is which restaurants did not.

Thoroughbreds Chophouse, at 9706 N Kings Highway between Lake Arrowhead and Chestnut Road, opened in 1988 and is still serving dinner Tuesday through Saturday. Nakato, a few blocks away, opened in 1978 as the first Japanese steakhouse in the Myrtle Beach area, at a time when hibachi tables were a novelty rather than a category. The Original Benjamin's Calabash Seafood, at 9593 N Kings Highway, has been running its buffet-style seafood room for more than three decades and can seat 1,000 people at once, a capacity built for a customer base that shows up on a Tuesday in February, not just a July Saturday.

None of these restaurants are marketed as hidden gems. They are on the busiest commercial highway on the Strand, visible from the road, easy to find. What kept them alive through 30 and 40 years of turnover is not obscurity. It is a base of diners who live close enough to treat them as a regular option rather than a once-a-trip splurge, which is exactly what a no-HOA, low-turnover neighborhood a few blocks away provides.

The Golf Cart Path Is The Tell

A recent Northwood listing description mentioned something easy to overlook: a golf cart path on 79th Avenue. That detail matters more than it looks. Golf cart infrastructure gets built where there is enough regular local traffic to justify it, not where tourists pass through for a week and leave. A path connecting a residential block to a commercial highway is a signal that enough people make that same short trip often enough for it to be worth paving separately from the road.

That is the physical version of what Thoroughbreds and Nakato represent on the business side. Northwood residents are not driving in from a rental unit twelve miles away to eat at these places once during a beach week. Some of them are riding a golf cart three or four blocks to a restaurant they have been going to for years, on a random Wednesday, because it is close and it is good and it does not require getting in a car.

The Newer Layer: Errands Without Leaving The Loop

The restaurants came first, opening in the 1970s and 1980s when this stretch of Kings Highway was still filling in. The everyday errand infrastructure came later, as the year-round residential population around Northwood grew enough to support it.

Grande Dunes Marketplace sits at the entrance to Grande Dunes on the 17 Bypass, at a signalized intersection at 82nd Avenue North, about a 99,000 square foot center anchored by a US Foods Chef Store and a CVS Pharmacy. A few minutes further down Kings Highway, the Village Shops at Grande Dunes at 7925 N Kings Highway is anchored by a 45,600 square foot Publix, with smaller retail and restaurant space wrapped around it.

Neither of these centers existed when Nakato opened its hibachi grills in 1978. Their arrival decades later marks the point where this corridor stopped being just a dinner destination for locals and became a full daily-errand loop: groceries, a pharmacy, a bulk food supplier, and dinner, all within the same few minutes of driving or golf-cart riding that Northwood residents were already doing for a steak or a sushi roll.

A short list of what that loop actually covers within a few minutes of Northwood:

• Groceries and pharmacy at the Publix-anchored Village Shops at Grande Dunes
• Bulk and restaurant-supply shopping plus CVS at Grande Dunes Marketplace
• Three decades-old dinner options on Kings Highway itself, none more than a few minutes apart
• Grand Strand Medical Center on 82nd Parkway, for the kind of everyday healthcare access that matters more once you are not just visiting

What The Longevity Actually Signals

None of this is really about restaurants. It is about what it means when a strip of businesses built to catch tourist dollars ends up outlasting most of the tourist-driven development around it because a residential neighborhood a few blocks away kept walking, driving, and cart-riding in for dinner on ordinary nights for decades.

Northwood was never built to be a resort address. It has no HOA, no amenity package, no golf course frontage of its own, just brick ranches on lots big enough for a fence and a pool, a few blocks from the beach and a few blocks from Pine Lakes Country Club history on one side and a working commercial corridor on the other. That commercial corridor absorbing the highway traffic is part of why the residential streets inside Northwood stay as quiet as they do. The businesses that lasted are the ones that figured out how to serve a neighborhood, not just a season.

If you already live in Northwood, none of this is news exactly, but it is worth knowing what you are actually part of when you pull into Thoroughbreds on a Thursday or ride a golf cart down 79th for a prescription refill. You are one of the reasons this stretch of Kings Highway looks the way it does instead of looking like every other overturned strip on the Grand Strand.

If you are weighing a move into this pocket of Myrtle Beach, or thinking about what a Northwood property is actually worth given what surrounds it, Kim Brooks can walk you through the details that matter, from zoning and lot size to what a few blocks of Kings Highway really means for daily life. Schedule a consultation when you are ready to talk specifics.